chimoose talks nonsense

Pages

Monday, May 15, 2017

As you’re likely aware, the US House of Representatives last week narrowly passed House of Representatives Bill 2192 – more commonly known as the American Health Care Act (AHCA) or Trumpcare. There was a time when physicians wouldn’t have been considered terribly “political,” and there still is a strongly pervasive “culture of permission” in medicine (see Dr. Bryan Vartabedian‘s thinking on this evolving phenomenon). However, like many other things we’ve taken for granted in the Trump era, the old rules really just don’t apply.

In order to assess physicians’ reactions to our most recent version of health reform, we consulted the MDigitalLife Online Health Ecosystem database. As a frame of reference, during the 3-year period between 2014 and 2016, .43% of physicians’ posts were related to health reform*. In the “new normal” of 2017, that percentage has risen to 3.1%, an increase of more than 6x.

Because we suspected that the passage of HR2192 in the house was going to cause a firestorm among online physicians, we decided to zoom in on the week that it was passed – Monday the 1st of May through Friday the 5th of May. As suspected, the passage of the house bill caused quite a stir.

Review the entire 3-Post series here; originally published on MDigitalLife.com:

Friday, February 10, 2017

I always love to see healthcare professionals joining the incredible online communities that have formed on Twitter over the last several years (indeed, MDigitalLife, my passion-turned-business unit at W2O Group, is based on exactly that). Wanted to highlight this nice resource that was recently created by AusMed, one of Australia's leading nursing education and continuing professional development (CPD) providers. It's designed to help nurses and midwives join twitter and participate in a way that is valuable, safe, and easy. Well done, folks!

Friday, March 11, 2016

I'm excited to introduce the latest edition to the growing number of MDigitalLife experiments ... MDigitalLife Snapshot. You can read all about it in Kayla Rodriguez' blog post ... but in the meantime I wanted to share it with you here. Check it out - and create your own by clicking the "create your own" tab (or by visiting j.mp/mdlsnapshot).

Sunday, August 2, 2015

A couple of connected posts hit my feeds on consecutive days ... the kind that really force a reaction. Nobody likes to think about dying. We in the US seem to have a particularly difficult time thinking about death, talking about death - and especially about planning for death.

Those who know me will be aware that I'm a big fan of Dr. Zubin Damania - an internist from Las Vegas who's better known as ZDoggMD. If you haven't checked out his growing library of parody videos, you really must. As a scientist, public health expert and comedian his work is truly genius (My favorites are his Dr. House of Cards videos). But ZDogg blew my mind a little bit this week with his latest video ... because it wasn't brilliantly funny. It was just brilliant.

But it also inspired an impassioned post from one of my favorite physician-writers, Dr. John Mandrola of Louisville, KY. Dr. Mandrola has written on his own blog for years, but now has become one of the leading physician bloggers in the world with his Trials and Fibrillations blog on TheHeart.org. Friday's post, Avoiding a bad death requires preparation, took the subject to a new level. It's my hope that more and more people will see these pleas from caring and thoughtful physicians and take action themselves. These docs have seen the consequences of failure to plan more than they can stand - they know what they're talking about!

The fact that Dr. Mandrola's post showed up in my personal facebook feed, having been shared by a friend, is a good sign that people ARE paying attention. Talk to your family about your advanced directive now!!

And if you've not already connected/subscribed to Drs. Damania, Sinclair and Mandrola, please do!

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Everyone who spends much time with me is a little sick of the "global health ecosystem" by now, because I've been obsessed with it for the last 3 months. For the rest of the world, though, it's a pretty new concept. In a nutshell:
We've been studying physicians' online conversations for years now. We've learned a massive amount about what kinds of docs are using social media, why, and what they're talking about. And all of that is amazing. But it pales in comparison to being able to understand how ALL the stakeholders in healthcare are interacting online. So now, instead of just indexing the world's doctors (149 countries and counting), we're also indexing the online presence (or "digital footprint" as we like to call it) of patients, hospitals, advocacy organizations, government organizations, healthcare companies, reporters, media outlets, researchers and research institutions, etc. If you want to see a little more, check out this 5 minute video of my presentation from the Techonomy Bio conference in Mountain View (March 2015).